With the holiday season upon us, that may mean hosting family and friends for dinners and parties. When you are hosting, you always want to make a great impression and if you like cooking that means breaking out the kitchen tools to make some great food for your guests. Sometimes this is also the spur to replace or upgrade a few items to take your home chef game to a new level. One of the most useful tools you can upgrade is your chef’s knives.
But, making decisions on which new chef’s knives to buy can take you down a real rabbit hole of options. While we won’t try to tackle all those possible choices in this article, we did want to cover one common question. Should you consider Western or Japanese styles for your chef’s knives?
What’s the difference between a Western and Japanese kitchen knife?
If you have done even the most cursory shopping for chef’s knives, you have likely seen the variety of styles available. But, two fairly common groupings involve what you might think of as more traditional Western knives and then Japanese knives that often have quite different shapes.
What is a Western-style Chef’s Knife?
You may also hear these referred to as German knives, as many of the high-end manufacturers started in Germany. Western kitchen knives tend to be heavier with a thicker blade with a gradual curve that makes it easy to use for a more rocking cutting motion. The size, shape, and weight, tend to make these knives excellent for cooking tasks like rough chopping, dicing, and cutting through dense vegetables.
What is a Japanese-style Chef’s Knife?
These blades have been used traditionally by sushi chefs and are often significantly lighter than Western blades. The shapes are often straighter and thinner, creating a sharper knife for precision cutting, slicing, and mincing softer vegetables and other food (fish, for example). Since they don’t have the natural curve, these knives can be harder to use when making lots of repetitive cuts.
So, which is better?
The short answer is neither or both. It really depends on the task you are using the chef’s knife for. Both are precision tools, designed for somewhat different tasks. In fact, if you do a lot of cooking, you may want to seriously consider having both types of knives in your arsenal to give you the widest range of knives to cover different techniques.
In the U.S. it likely makes sense to start off with a good set of Western-style knives. But, as you build your cooking acumen, having a variety of Japanese knives can open up a wide range of new options and techniques.
How much do they cost?
Like any kitchen tool, it depends on the quality you are looking for. You can certainly find Western-style chef’s knives at reasonable (or even cheap) prices online and at various retailers. But, you tend to get what you pay for. So, if you want to add some quality cutlery to your kitchen, you can expect to pay up to $100 or more for a quality Western kitchen knife.
And, if you have an unlimited budget, there are options ranging into the thousands. When it comes to Japanese knives, you really are looking at spending around $100 for a solid kitchen knife, and again prices can become astronomical for the highest-end options.
For Western knives, you can check out manufacturers like Wusthof and Zwilling J. A. Henckels (two of the best-known German knife companies). For a U.S. brand, you might consider Bob Kramer. For Japanese blades, you can look at knife makers like Shun, Korin, or Mac.
